Word: caine
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Take last year's The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by buddy and fellow ball of energy Bob Rafelson. In this remake of the 1946 filming of James Cain's lascivious novelette, the wayfaring Nicholson picks up work at a gas station/diner because he lusts for the Greek owner's wife. The original discarded all ethnic and sexual references, using only the plot outline. You know how people fall in love in those old movies--a look and a kiss. It usually sufficed, but not when homicide was involved. Nicholson's bestial portrayal, with the re-inserted punching and humping...
Many had trouble accepting this motivation, especially when Nicholson's character did not receive the retribution Cain had planned, the (unjust, but plausible) charge of murdering Nora Papadakis, who dies when their car crashes. Rafelson explained his modified denouement as sufficiently powerful: seeing Jack Nicholson cry makes you feel rotten enough, and seeing him (as the book would) sentenced to death for following his passions would be too much...
Fortunately, most of the cast avoids the kind of overacting that could push Cain's overdirecting into disaster. Henry Wolonicz as Hamlet in particular surpasses the direction, creating a sympathetic and consistent prince even in the midst of Cain-created confusion...
EVERYTHING THAT FUMBLES and gets lost in Cain's laborious excavation of meanings from within is illuminated from without by the flip-side production. Tom Stoppard's wild and brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, directed by Thomas Edward West...
Upon this connection the rest of the play falls into place. And in the picture which it creates, Hamlet too takes on a clarity and reality than it could not realize if confined to Cain's relentless search for meanings in the unfathomably rich script. The "straight" interpretation of the Shakespeare that frames Stoppard's whimsy clashes oddly at times with the fanciful variations of Cain's direction, but no matter. This is what imaginative repertory ought to be--two plays that share everything and yet nothing, each distorting, reflecting, and illuminating the other...